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Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, HWV46a

Introduction

The Overture (or Sonata) announces that this is a work of intense drama and opposed states of being. An Allegro of exuberant gaiety is halted by a minor-key Adagio plangent with suggestions of doubt, sorrow and regret.

The opening shows Bellezza looking into her mirror: Fido specchio. Handel’s music gives us a lively young woman. She is clearly not the Platonic ideal of beauty, for she locates her identity and her self-esteem in her looks, though she knows she is bound to lose them. She takes surface appearance to be the whole truth, saying to her mirror ‘I am as I see myself in you’. Anxious about her future, she readily commits her entire happiness to a man who tells her he can preserve her appearance, and without cosmetic surgery. She swears a lovers’ pact of fidelity to Piacere: they get engaged. In fact it is clear from Bellezza’s later words, ‘Piacere, you who once lived with me’, that they move in together.

Piacere’s nature is also evident to the listener, if not to Bellezza. His final utterance will reveal that he is composed of deceit, and his first makes him sound like a trickster. Even before he utters, the ugly angularity of the ritornello to his first aria, Fosco genio, shows us that when he says that the mind is its own place—just as Satan does in Paradise Lost—he is offering no firm foundation.

The initial utterance of the other two characters, Disinganno and Tempo, is a joint recitative (Ed io), indicating the unity of their thinking, and presaging their combined ‘education’ of Bellezza.

We are bound to notice the contrast provided to Piacere’s angular melody and edgy harmony by the limpid directness of melody and harmony of Disinganno’s first aria. Se la bellezza is a continuo aria whose entire first strophe is initially heard completely unaccompanied. This is the music of unadorned truth, which is what Disinganno will show to Bellezza when she is ready for it. But Una schiera shows Bellezza cheerfully following Piacere’s instruction to use mental control: she is going to divide her forces, putting a cohort of her pleasures on guard over her thoughts. That is, she is not going to let herself actually think.

Tempo’s response is to try to frighten Bellezza out of her senses and into her intellect, by making her accept that no beauty lasts for ever and she will die. Treating her like the child that she still is spiritually and emotionally, he does not tell her facts, he shows them, displaying skeletal dust in a macabre scene that anticipates Romantic gothic horror (Urne voi). Bellezza’s insecurity, her anxiety about the future, about the unknown—something common to us all—is repeatedly the door by which all three advisers try to reach her.

All three having made their appeal, Bellezza chooses to stay with Piacere. In the headlong, carefree runs of their duet Il voler they are in perfect harmony. Their conclusion is that to spend time worrying is vanità, is futile, which is an inversion of true wisdom, and a failure on Bellezza’s part to recognize her own vanità, vanity, in gazing into a mirror (a characteristic Pamphili pun). Piacere’s argument is always the same: there will be plenty of time to change one’s life before it ends, seriousnesss can be left till one’s old. Disinganno warns them: no one can know when the end will come. Bellezza can only respond by proposing to deny the very existence of time, but her aria actually shows her in frantic flight from his ‘devouring’ scythe (Un pensiero nemico di pace—a fine instance of the psychological sense of the da capo aria, where the original idea cannot be shaken off and returns to haunt the singer).

In Folle, tu nieghi’l tempo Disinganno now also works on Bellezza’s anxiety, explaining to her what Tempo had made only terrifying. Disinganno tries to bring death, and hence, the idea of eternity home to Bellezza with reference to her own family entombed. The result is Bellezza’s first progress. In Con ingegnosa she has arrived at recognizing that neglect of time is self-deceit and ‘enjoyment’ is only possible when one is self-deceivingly neglectful of time. So she now has the beginning of a true appreciation of the power of time (she has yet to appreciate that time is not all-powerful), but she does not yet understand enjoyment, because she still conceives of it only as worldly delight.

With Tempo and Disinganno gaining on her in their joint exposition of time’s inevitable march (Nasce l’uomo), Piacere plays his trump card and leads Bellezza to his palace of delights, which is filled with artful and rather sinister versions of himself, and where the crowning sensory pleasure is hearing un leggiadro giovinetto, a charming youth—who would have been Handel himself—play a dazzling organ sonata. The result is that, because Handel’s music seems to make time stand still, Bellezza concludes that time is powerless (Venga il Tempo). This is a true-to-life instance of the reality of human progress: two steps forward and one step back. The charms of Pleasure’s palace have made Bellezza forget what she had just learnt about time. Disinganno tries to remind her, in the beautiful Crede l’uom, with the relentless tread of time in the accompaniment and the expanding spread of time’s wings in the vocal line—and a sharper warning in the middle section.

Despite all the powerful attractions of his palace, Piacere has not secured Bellezza. She is still anxious, and with ‘Piacere, io non t’intendo’ she now locates him as a source of her anxiety and confusion, which is new. She also says that Tempo and Disinganno are unavoidably her companions, which is also new, and leaves herself open to learning about the mirror of Truth.

Tempo thereupon explains his real nature to her: he is not omnipotent, and she can after all avoid his claws, by aspiring to heaven. Quanto chiude la terra is the first direct mention of religious faith, and Folle reinforces the contrast of heavenly security and earthly vulnerability. With La reggia del Piacer vedesti Disinganno and Tempo make her an outright invitation to ‘genuine pleasure’ in ‘the palace where truth resides’ (as opposed to Pleasure’s palace). In the quartet-style exchange that follows, Bellezza, while still hoping for a pain-free existence, is attracted to the idea of ‘true pleasure’. She accepts that it may lie somewhere as yet unknown to her. Piacere seizes on her uncertainty, warning her against uncharted terrain. With ‘Io preparo presenti contenti’ (in the Quartet) he traduces Tempo’s and Disinganno’s offering as an illusion invented to foster heroism (here Il trionfo anticipates Handel’s much later oratorio about choosing how to live, The Choice of Hercules). Piacere is playing on Bellezza’s lack of courage and fear of the unknown to instil low self-esteem in her. His implication is: you are no hero, you cannot reach this level.

In Part 2 Time unveils Truth, who is eternally beautiful. It is an adroit way to attract Bellezza to Truth to tell her that it is not only bella but sempre bella—exactly what she said in her first aria that she wanted for herself. Piacere’s response, in Chiudi, is to try to prevent Bellezza from seeing Truth, to remain in denial, telling her to ‘close your eyes’—like children who block something out by shutting their eyes to it. But at the same time Piacere is threatening, warning Bellezza that if she listens to Disinganno and Tempo she will lose her pleasure for ever.

But this time, for the first time, Bellezza does not obey him; instead she responds to Time’s reproof of her refusal of ‘the eternal lights’ and his encouragement to pursue ‘hope and deeds’. She faces Truth, for the first time. And immediately, in Io sperai, she is plunged into grief. Realizing that Truth will not offer the kind of pleasure that she wanted, and now surrendering her illusion that the kind of pleasure that she wanted can exist indefinitely, she is doubly lost: Piacere causes her distress, and Truth, as yet, is no comfort. This is the awful moment of realizing that what one thought was the love of one’s life is all wrong, but feeling that there is no replacement of that support in sight; of acknowledging that the affair has to end but feeling that to surrender the love is to face bleakness, loneliness and isolation. Bellezza now needs to be assured there is life after this desolation; she has no sense of it yet. Handel makes us hear that her life has no basis now, with unsupported or barely supported oboe and voice in the outer sections of Io sperai and solitary chromatic wandering by the voice in the middle section.

Piacere recognizes that this is a turning point. In the savage contours of Tu giurasti, no longer blandishing, we hear the brutal bitterness of the weak lover threatened with rejection: spiteful, menacing and, in the lurching modulations of the central section, tending to lose control.

But once more Bellezza does not respond to him. Tempo demands a decision, but in Io vorrei she is still torn: she wants to reform but she wants pleasure. She is at an impasse because she has not yet realized that more than one kind of pleasure is possible. Hence the interjection by Disinganno at the end of the first section: ‘which pleasure?’. That moves her on: in the central section she says that she wants to be clear that what she thought was her happiness was a mistake. Without the relationship that affirmed her identity, she has lost her bearings, she is confused, and Handel makes her still terribly sad: tears drip down in the bass.

Tempo and (especially) Disinganno are now crediting Bellezza with having increasing adulthood. They do not tell her what to think but ask her what she thinks (‘Che pensi … a qual piacere?’); and she enters into discussion with Disinganno about her state of mind. When she confesses that real fear (not just anxiety) is making her close her eyes to the truth, Disinganno, in Più non cura, shows her the region which she can inhabit if she can let go of her misguided relationship: not trapped in the dark valley but in the clear air and wide views of the mountain tops, to which Handel adds a promise of security with pastoral drone and recorders. Tempo encourages her that ‘the haven is near’ and provides an image of a ship in trouble—which Handel makes positively tempest-tossed—to warn her of the alternative.

This leads Bellezza to another key moment of progression: Dicesti il vero, ‘You have spoken the truth, and belatedly I understand’. But she is still in ‘anguish’ and ‘grief’. She has achieved full rational acceptance, but she still has a long way to go to reach emotional equilibrium. She is on the right path, but clear-sightedness is so painful that she flinches from it: ‘voglio e non voglio’ (‘I want and yet do not want’).

Bellezza’s opening line to the second (this time fully concerted) quartet, Voglio Tempo, is a pun: she is saying both ‘I don’t want to have to decide yet’ and ‘I want Time to decide for me’, that is, I don’t want to have to decide for myself at all. Emotional confusion has sent her back into her child mode. Handel supplies a musical pun too: on the word ‘Tempo’ Bellezza tries to hold time still but is defeated by the relentless striding bass. In the middle section Piacere tells her that (as he and Bellezza said in their duet in Part 1) there will be plenty of time for a change of heart. But this is a weak persuasion in the context of eternity which Bellezza now assents to, and shows Piacere beginning to be left behind, himself stuck in the mindset he wants to wish on her, not having realized that she is moving on.

Discussing the fetid garden of Piacere’s palace (Presso la reggia), Bellezza really engages with Disinganno. Now it is not Tempo and Disinganno asking leading questions of her, she is volunteering apt questions herself: a sign of growing psychological strength. Piacere needs to exert himself to get her back, and so, with no recitative, he launches musically the most seductive number of the whole work, Lascia la spina. Unlike Piacere’s other persuasions this one is apparently simple, apparently transparent, with (maybe) real feeling on Piacere’s part: regret at the fragility of worldly enjoyment. But again Bellezza ignores Piacere and, having withstood even this appeal, she asks ‘cortese’ Disinganno to show her the mirror of Truth. Significantly it is her initiative, not his. So compelling is Truth now for her, that as soon as she holds its mirror, and even before she looks into it, it precipitates the major turning point: her closure of the affair. She says goodbye to Piacere.

Yet in Bellezza’s following aria, Voglio cangiar desio, the flow of the melody is repeatedly interrupted by a jagged Presto rush of semiquavers, ending Adagio. Does this figure represent Piacere trying to grab Bellezza, making what he realizes is a last-chance attempt to snatch her from Disinganno? Or does it represent Bellezza flinching from the brink of almost going back to Piacere after all?—for she is as yet only saying that she wants to change, not that she will change. Either way, this semiquaver interruption suggests (very truly) that a determination to change can be undermined, for it does not of itself annul the power of the old attraction. Nevertheless, decisive and dramatic action follows: at Or che tiene, Bellezza hurls away her deceitful mirror and breaks it, even though Piacere tries to stop her, prevented by Disinganno (whose condemnatory Chi già fu can apply equally to the false mirror and the deceitful Piacere).

But then Bellezza looks in the mirror of Truth—and sees herself as ugly (Ma che veggio). Her plunge into self-disgust is psychologically acute. Recognition of her own responsibility for her own past, coupled with loss of the dearest part of life, leads to a crash in self-esteem. Her language becomes loaded with metaphors of self-harm. She resolves ‘this day [to] see the end of my delusions’. The shame that accompanies realization of folly makes her exaggerate her culpability and the punishment due to it. She not only divests herself of all the trappings of beauty (in Ricco pino, adopting Tempo’s image of her as a vessel looking for its harbour). In Si, bella Penitenza, she asks for a hair shirt, and says that she will go into a solitary cell as punishment for being a monster of vanity. She feels she cannot face the world. Such self-loathing and self-blame are very true to the shattering of confidence that she has gone through. She needs to be restored to some sense of self-worth in order to function in the world once more.

In Il bel pianto Disinganno and Tempo welcome Bellezza’s penitent tears. With this beautiful duet, their final utterance, they relinquish their advisory stance, stepping back into the position of approving commentators. Bellezza advances now without their prompting. She shows she is not narcissistic or self-enclosed in her misery, in that she offers Piacere the option of sharing Truth with her—or of leaving her for ever. She now is free of his control of her to the extent that she takes no notice of his reaction, as he disappears like a cloud in a storm, confessing in the central section of Come nembo (himself now sounding like a lost child) that he is entirely composed of deceit. Praying in the final recitative ‘let my actions respond to my great desire’, Bellezza recognizes that faith and remorse alone are not enough; she has moved on from all-consuming self-reproach to a new equilibrium and the intention to live well.

Bellezza is praying to her guardian angel, and since this is a Christian work, its end is dependence on God, not self-reliance. Without belief in life after death, this Everyman drama would be very different. But it is the meshing of its religious-moral didacticism with psychological insight, fully realized in music, that makes Il trionfo one of Handel’s most intensely, most realistically and most satisfyingly human works.

Recordings

‘Il trionfo’ is a landmark in baroque music. It is Handel’s first oratorio, product of his astonishing flowering in Italy in his early twenties. The libretto is a highly crafted composition drawing on a rich mix of artistic forebears. This is the sec ...» More

Beauty: Faithful mirror, in you I admire
the glory of my youthful years:
yet one day I shall be changed.
You shall always remain as you are,
I am as I see myself in you;
I shall not always be beautiful.
Faithful mirror, etc.

Pleasure: A gloomy spirit and black despair
never come singly, because one alone
creates a thousand more.
Whoever fails to remove
their tyranny from his thoughts
shall never know a happy day.
A gloomy spirit, etc.

You funeral urns that enclose
so many beauties,
be opened,
show me
if any of their light
remains in you.
Rather be closed:
spectres of grief
and ghastly skeletons
are what my teeth have left behind.
You funeral urns, etc.

A thought hostile to peace
caused fickle Time to be devouring,
and gave him his wings and his scythe.
A second, lighter, thought arises
to deny such stern tyranny,
whereupon Time is Time no more.
A thought, etc.

Enlightenment: Foolish one, you deny Time, yet even now
he is devouring part of your beauty.
Say, what is left of your forebears?
Only cold bones remain,
which a tiny urn or a chill stone conceals.
Tell me, what remains for you
of your years already past? Oh, foolish deceits!
Though the years keep returning, beauty never returns.

Pleasure: Time has always been unpleasing to man.

Beauty: With cunning self-deceit, when one
is not thinking of Time, then one enjoys oneself.

Pleasure: This is my palace,
admire how I appear in many forms.
See, crowned with roses
and carved in choicest white marble,
a graceful company of meandering youths.
Look at that one sleeping:
poppies intertwined
with green ivy form his crown,
his much dishevelled hair neither changes
nor is whitened by care.
Then on the left side
see Grief depicted in black stone, killed
by a charming boy with a smile on his lips.
Another, near him, with fierce looks,
keeps guard the approaches to my court, and says:
‘Away, pale cares, away to exile’.

Let Time come, and with his dark wings
dare to take away these
dear joys from these pleasant shores.
But he sleeps, and no longer has claws;
no, his counsels have no effect
unless one is never to live in this life.
Let Time come, etc.

Beauty: Pleasure, I do not understand you;
you are always with me, mingled with anxiety,
and always with me are Time and Enlightenment.

Time: Whatever this world encompasses is my realm.
If you do not want to see me,
aspire to gain a precious seat in Heaven;
in Heaven, where I have no place,
and where glorious Eternity resides.
Make better use of me,
for if Pleasure deceives you,
and your repentance is too late,
you will call on me, and I shall say: ‘I do not hear you’.

Foolish one, do you alone presume
that Time will not pass for you?
I pass through seas, mountains, rivers,
secured fortresses amid the terrors of war,
and the happy dwellings of rough shepherds,
I alone can breach with unflinching steps.
Foolish one, etc.

Time: Now that you have now seen the fanciful picture
of false pleasure,
look, I draw back the curtain
of the theatre of truth. See and admire,
admire her who is called Truth; you will see
that she wears no adornment, yet is always beautiful.
Clad in white robes,
see how she turns to the eternal Sun,
and see too that mirror,
which to frail sight and to human thought
shows false what is false, and true what is true.

Time: Divide the hours of your life
into three parts, and look at each one;
look at Time past,
look, heartless one, at your refusal
of the eternal lights, and at your own error.
Look at Time present, dying even as it is born.
If from behind yonder heavy curtain
where Time future lies
your gaze can discern nothing,
the way is open to hope and deeds.

Most foolish is that steersman
who will not change course
yet knows the wind to be fickle.
O ship, though you be finely decked out,
return, return
while you have time, return to shore.
Most foolish, etc.

He who was once the counsellor of
blond tresses shall fall to the ground.
Let him indeed suffer ruin,
since so often he devised,
with lilies and roses,
so many deceits for beauty.
He who was once, etc.

Beauty: But what do I see, what observe?
I thought myself beautiful, but I am ugly.
In my blond tresses
may shame and grief
with their chains of stiff serpents
gnaw at my thoughts and my joys.
Yes, yes, fall to the ground,
you rich adornments of my hair,
let this day see the end of my delusions.

A rich ship
on its voyage
throws into the sea
its gold and precious stones
if its progress is hindered.
The treasures
it scattered it then finds;
to a ship which is lost
finding a harbour is a great reward.
A rich ship, etc.

Yes, fair Penitence,
while I in repentance shed bitter tears
bring me the hair shirt,
and as I throw away the flowers, give me the thorns.
In deserted places
I shall live, but always alone,
for a monster of vanity must live
among monsters, alone in solitary cells.

Enlightenment and Time: The beautiful tears of dawn,
glowing in gold,
are pearls in every flower.
But their liquid is less pleasing
than the tears that grief awakens
in a heart that has become repentant.
The beautiful tears, etc.

Beauty: Pleasure, you who once lived with me,
see again the truth in this mirror,
or flee so far from me
that I shall never more recall
the when and how of your vile birth,
and may I lose all memory of you, and your very name.

You, high minister of Heaven,
shall see no more in my heart
a faithless wish or empty craving.
And though I lived unmindful of God,
may you, as guardian of my heart,
bring to Him a heart made new.
You, high minister, etc.